Six countries, one camera.

He crossed into Afghanistan for the first time after September 2001, while the Taliban still held Kandahar, and decided that photography would be how he answered what he saw. He worked in Bamyan from 2005 with the International Organization for Migration, moved to Kabul in 2007, and held his first solo exhibition that year.

He photographed for the US Embassy, for the Red Cross's orthopaedic centre, for the newspapers that would later run his work: The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, Stern. In 2009 a grant from the Open Society Institute funded seven months on The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan.

Four days in Bangkok waiting to be taken to Malaysia. A border crossing by boat. Three nights under house arrest in Kuala Lumpur, not allowed near a window. A flight to Sumatra, a car with the windows locked for 21 hours, a villa in Bogor where three roommates went ahead on an earlier boat. It sank, and only one of them lived.

He kept photographing. The smugglers did not mind a camera. They minded a journalist, and he had stopped saying he was one.

UNHCR recognised him as a refugee and Australia's humanitarian programme brought him to Darwin in 2013. Within months he had won two Nikon-Walkleys and was photographing the Hazara community of Dandenong, where he now lives.

Since then: a TEDxSydney talk that has been played more than a million times, exhibitions at the Western Australian Museum, State Library Victoria and the University of South Australia, a documentary that won Best Director at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival, teaching photojournalism at RMIT, coordinating the Refugee Leadership Program at the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, and founding the Hazara Cultural Association. He is now co-directing My Refugee Journey, the feature film of all of the above, with Kasimir Burgess.